Thursday, May 21, 2015

The project

  • Socio-ecologicl factors affecting natural resource efficiency of nations

  • What are the societal and environmental conditions that help national economies increase the efficiency with which they use natural resources to achieve social, economic and environmental outcomes?

  • Opportunity provided by a globl dataset accounting for structure of material conumption in the global economy of more than 150 nations.

  • (Comparing evidence for some long-standing hypotheses)

Overview

  • background

  • macroecology

  • two challenges for a macro-socio-ecology

  • technical

  • conceptual

  • a bit of data to ponder

Naive?

Background

  • macroecology and evolutionary biology
  • climate change impacts on wildlife
  • applied evolutionary biology
  • next-generation ecology

Macroecology

Human macroecology 101

  • activity requires energy

Human macroecology 101

  • earth has an environmental carrying capacity for humans (AKA planetary boundaries)

Current focus

  • How do general patterns of ecology relate to the real world?

    • How can their real world relevance be improved?

    • Decrease social naivity?

Macro-socio-ecology?

  • How does natural resource use relate to social, enviornmental, economic outcomes?

  • How efficient is resource extraction with regard to impact on environment?

  • How does social, environmental, economic factors affect efficiency?

Two challenges for a macro-socio-ecology

  • Technical Globalization of the economy influences the structure of consumption

    • sub-global scale
  • Conceptual Integrate social aspects into human macroecology

    • e.g. how we use resources to achieve social outcomes

    • local to global scale

Structure of consumption

Ongoing research on structure of consumption

  • Take advantage of improvements in measuring consumption in the globalized economy

  • Compare long-standing "socio-ecological" hypotheses from across disciplines on trends in structure

Structure of consumption

  • measuring consumption based on import-export statistics

"Trends show that resource productivity measured in this way" … ", suggesting that a relative, and even absolute, decoupling of economic growth and resource use has been achieved."

"However, the scope of these measures is limited to the amount of materials directly used by an economy. It does not include the upstream raw materials related to imports and exports originating from outside of the focal economy." (Wiedmann et al. 2013)

Structure of consumption

  • global value chains

Structure of consumption

  • improvements

Structure of consumption

  • macroecology

Change in structure can influence evalution of long-standing hypotheses

  • Environmental quality and per capita GDP (Environmental Kuznets Curve)

    • environmental pollution has an inverse "U" shape with affluence

Is the technical challenge addressed?

  • MRIO data relies heavily on data interpolation (e.g. Lenzen et al. 2012)

  • To what level of detail is the data meaningful?

  • What is signal and what is noise?

    • Compare temporal dynamics with other accounting methods

The conceptual challenge… a macro-socio-ecology?

Need for a macro-socio-ecology?

  • Importance:

    • Provide an overview and facilitate new visions
  • Challenges:

    • Fragmentation of field

    • Integrated studies have a small-scale history, or …

    • Large-scale studies poor/no replication

The socio-ecological system

  • small scale and simple interactions

National natural resource studies

  • Contested field

  • Disparate methodologies

  • "As in any contested field a wide array of theories have emerged to describe the relationship among the variables of interest, and each of these theories leads to starkly different conclusions and policy recommendations." (Sherbinin et al. 2007)

Path forward?

Some existing macro-scopic frameworks

  • Environmental impact
    • IPAT (including Kaya identities)
    • Planetary boundaries
  • Social
    • Social IPAT = DPAE
    • Raworth's social foundation
  • Environmental and social
    • Comprehensive wealth
    • Genuine Progress Indicator
    • The planetary doughnut

Path forward? - comprehensive wealth

  • "Sustainability is demonstrated by showing that a properly defined comprehensive measure of wealth is maintained through time."

    • Value, sum of natural, human and reproducible capital
    • Does not address natural resource efficiency per se

Path forward? - Genuine Progress Indicator

  • Personal Consumption Expenditures adjusted for 24 components, e.g. income distribution, environmental costs, negative activities (e.g. crime, pollution), positive components (e.g. benefits of volunteering and household work)

    • Valuation approach
    • Meaning of sum … ?
  • Not meant to be an indicator of sustainability. Measure of economic welfare, needs to be viewed alongside other indicators, e.g. biophysical.

    • Does not address natural resource efficiency per se

Path forward? - Genuine Progress Indicator

(Kubiszewski et al. 2013)

Path forward? - doughnut

  • Doughnut economics

    • Operationalization?

Path forward? - From IPAT to DPAE

  • Development = Population x Affluence x Equity

    • Parris and Kates 2003
    • Ignores natural resources
    • How to measure equity?

A simple and pragmatic path - forward?

  • D / I

  • Development outcome per cumulative environmental change

    • environmental impact hard to assign due to globalized supply chains and poor monitoring
  • Alternative: Development outcome / consumed resources

Socio-economic efficiency of consumption

  • how does change in national consumption contribute to?

    • shape of income distribution

    • median income

    • health & well-being

    • Human Development Index?

    • etc. etc.

Development and consumption

  • general picture

  • increased development requires resources?

Economic efficiency of consumption?

  • when GDP goes up national energy consumption increases

Economic efficiency of consumption?

  • … but not always

Change in development and consumption

  • change in Human Development Index and Ecological Footprint between 1980 and 2010 (Steffen et al. 2011)

HDI & globalized consumption

  • change in human development index and material footprint between 1990 and 2008

MF & HDI - 1990-2000

MF & HDI - 2000-2008

GDP & globalized consumption

  • change in GDP and material footprint between 1990 and 2008

MF & GDP 2000-2008

MF & GDP 2000-2008

HDI per cap consumption over time

GDP per cap consumption over time

Divergent trends from 1990 to 2008

HDI resource change

GDP resource change

GDP/MF change vs. HDI/MF change

Environmental efficiency of resource extraction

  • hard to address consumption due to globalization

  • how does change in national extraction contribute to?

    • a stronger test of the EKC?

    • preservation of biodiversity, environment and ecosystem services

      • land cover change

      • biodiversity

Concluding perspectives

  • Technical status: Major improvements in addressing technical challenge

  • Conceptual status: Conceptual challenge is only starting to be addressed

  • The need Faciltating imagining a better future

Thank you

Climate change impacts on wildlife

Applied evolutionary biology

Next-generation ecology - INNGE

  • GCIP
    • Global Reach
    • Community Participation
    • Continuous Innovation
    • Open Platform

Structure of consumption

  • "driving"" factors
    • demography (increase by necessity)
    • size of macroeconomic sectors (increase by choice/necessity)
    • personal income (increase by choice)
    • resource endowments (delay subsidization - cite Galli 2014 paper)
    • international resource security (the stability of resource supply and prices from potential donors)
    • impacts of resource extraction and processing
    • culture
    • domestic conflict e.g. violent conflicts such as civil war

Efficiency of consumption - energy

  • change in human development index and energy consumption between 1980 and 2008

TIME SEGMENTS UNTIL 2008

DECADE BY DECADE

MF - DECADE BY DECADE

log 10 HDI per cap consum - 1980,1990,2000,2008

log 10 GDP per cap consum - 1980,1990,2000,2008